Sitting, seeing and getting lost: the sensory aesthetics of Latvia’s women’s prison

This chapter delves into what imprisonment feels like in the global east, with a particular focus on the first encounter with the prison as an institution of confinement. The central claim of this chapter is that by focusing on women’s sensory experience of imprisonment at the start of their sentence, a better understanding can be gathered about carceral power, which in the global east is a relational and symbolic one rather than a physical manifestation in space. The spatial and cultural ‘carceral collectivism’ facilitates an intimacy in the sensorial spectrum of surveillance that essentially provides both control and support functions.